From Dan Gillmor's Sunday column in the San Jose Mercury News:
Posted by DeLong at September 09, 2002 11:43 AM | Trackback10 choices that were critical to the Net's success
By Dan Gillmor
Mercury News Technology Columnist
In our modern, corporate culture, the rise of the Internet is a happy accident. In its roots and growth, says Scott Bradner, the Net never had a business model.
How did technologists, government officials and a host of other early players turn something with no obvious business model into a system that has become so intrinsic to the new century? A series of decisions proved critical -- choices that helped turn data transport into a commodity business and put the power in users' hands, not in the centralized telecommunications companies' controlling grasp.
At a telecom conference in Massachusetts last week, Bradner, senior technical consultant at Harvard University and a longtime leader in the formation of Internet standards, listed 10 crucial decisions along the way. (You may have other candidates; send them to me and I'll list them on my Web page). Here are Bradner's picks:
1) Make it all work on top of existing networks. Designers deliberately didn't try to build a single, new über-data network -- it was about ``networks, not a network,'' Bradner observes. This meant supporting multiple network types by putting a simple set of rules, now called the Internet protocols, on top. This added layer was wide open for innovation, not controlled by a few players.
2) Use packets, not circuits. Telephone networks open a circuit from one phone to another, keeping the connection open until the call is ended. The Internet splits messages into little packages called packets, which are sent to their destination by various routes and at various times. This was a radical idea at the time, but it has been one of the qualities that makes the Internet so basically reliable and resilient under stress.
3) Create a ``routing'' function. Stand-alone boxes along the way from point to point make instant decisions on what route to send each packet by, reacting to failures in the networks. Again, this was a decentralizing function that enhanced reliability.
4) Split the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), which are generally used together in much of what we do on the Net and are called TCP/IP. Originally they were meant to be tied together in a single service designed to guarantee that the stream of data would get to its destination complete and in perfect order. To do this, however, would have given network services far less flexibility. IP by itself offers an unreliable but still enormously valuable service, simply sending the packets through the network without checking to see if they all get there.
TCP makes sure, among other things, that they actually do get there. So an application can use TCP if it cares most about reliability, while another application can use IP (and other protocols) if it's more concerned with timeliness -- such as an Internet phone call -- where losing a few packets matters much less than getting most of the data there on time.
5) The National Science Foundation (NSF) funds the University of California-Berkeley, to put TCP/IP into the Unix operating system originally developed by AT&T. Berkeley thereby created a full but low-cost network operating system, along with a full suite of network applications, that computer start-up companies flocked to use in their boxes. It was, says Bradner, ``a way to get into the networking game without spending a lot of money.'' So it spread fast.
6) CSNET, an early network used by universities, connects with the ARPANET, the Internet precursor network operated by the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency. ARPA funded much of the early technical work on what later became the Net. ARPANET use had been restricted solely to government-funded individuals. The connection was for e-mail only, but it led to much more university research on networks and a more general understanding among students, faculty and staff of the value of internetworking. When students graduated, they sought employers that had the technology.
7) The NSF requires users of the NSFNET to use TCP/IP, not competing protocols. This decision about the NSFNET, which was originally created to connect supercomputer centers, forced wider availability of the TCP/IP protocol, and helped prevent a wasteful ``proliferation of miscellaneous transport protocols for the Internet,'' Bradner says.
8) International telecommunications standards bodies reject TCP/IP, then create a separate standard called OSI. TCP/IP, remember, was designed as a low layer on top of which other applications, such as e-mail, would be created. OSI was carrier-centric, a suite of protocols that included things like e-mail. Had TCP/IP been accepted and then co-opted by the international groups and telecom companies, things we now take for granted might not have appeared, or might have been under central control. One the fundamentals of the Net is we can create new protocols on top of IP, as Tim Berners-Lee did to create the World Wide Web, says Bradner -- ``and we don't have to have permission of the carriers to do that.
9) The NSF creates an ``Acceptable Use Policy'' restricting NSFNET use to noncommercial activities. Although this rule grew blurry, it was largely heeded despite fierce criticism. The result was an incentive to create commercial network providers. The commercial providers created a huge business of long-haul ``backbone'' and local carriers upon which the Internet relies today.
10) Once things start to build, government stays mostly out of the way. If the Internet suffered from a lack of regulation, Bradner says, it was ``a good suffering'' for all of us.
One of the very odd and very clever things about the internet is its combination of transparency and anonymity-- 'Nobody knows you're a dog'...
Posted by: Matt on September 9, 2002 12:38 PM>>How did technologists, government officials and a host of other early players turn something with no obvious business model into a system that has become so intrinsic to the new century?<<
The Internet is the jewel in the crown of the "new economy" according to all those boosters who claim that free enterprise and markets are the only way to do anything right. I have always found the claim ironic considering the profoundly non-commercial beginnings of the Internet. As we all know, its roots were in universities, DARPA, CERN for the WWW, and so on. To the extent that private industry got involved, it was monopolies (principally AT&T, who gave us UNIX and C). The columnist is surprised that this got done "without a business model". Surely what is important is that it **could not have been done** in a market-based private sector framework.
Posted by: Tom Slee on September 10, 2002 06:24 AMDon't forget to give credit to the NSF Connection Grants. The program was created in 1990 with a very specific goal: connect as many institutions of higher education to NSFnet (and, later, the Internet) as possible, thereby creating a critical mass necessary to spur economic development, which would be necessary for the 'net to be self-sustaining.
Posted by: Mike on September 10, 2002 08:56 AMIn the original text, it's written, "To do this, however, would have given network services far less flexibility. IP by itself offers an unreliable but still enormously valuable service, simply sending the packets through the network without checking to see if they all get there." I'm no TCP/IP expert, but this seems to me to be a little misleading. TCP is for transmission control; IP is for addressing. When TCP is being used by something like ftp, IP is still being used. Some applications *do* make use of UDP instead of TCP (UDP provides fewer guarantees than TCP). But in that case, again, it's UDP that's actually sending the packets; IP is for addressing.
Also, even if you're using TCP, you don't really know for sure that the address you're sending to/receiving from is what it claims it is by IP---there's no authentication scheme.
Then again, as I said before, I'm no expect on TCP/IP, so maybe I'm flat-out wrong. But this little detail makes me wonder about the other judgements in the article.
sjfromm
An interesting analysis that barely gets the Geek stuff right and ignores what was really happening. What really happened was... Sputnik.
(Uh oh, I feel an essay coming on. Where's that soapbox...)
Sputnik was the 9/11 of its day. It shocked the US (and the world). The space race was only peripherally about satellites and putting men on the moon. It was about building rockets that could carry nuclear missiles. If the Russians were ahead of the US in launching satellites, it meant The Russians were ahead of the US in delivering nuclear bombs.
Fortunately, that was back in the day when presidents weren't unelected cowards. Eisenhower and then Kennedy reacted appropriately. ARPA and NASA were created. Without getting too much into the history (I don't have my urls handy), What we now call the Internet was funded by the government specifically to provide command and control for nuclear missiles. Hence packet switching (as opposed to circuit switching or message switching) in case one of the nodes was destroyed. For example, Chicago.
Not all of the techies involved were working to stop the Godless Commies; we're still talking geeks. But there's no question: This was a Defense Depertmant project. And, though it's roots are not directly in NASA, the Internet/WWW can rightly be called a spinoff of the most successful project in human history: The US Space Program.
Interestingly, all the comments so far have mentioned technical milestones but not the political ones. While the technical milestones are important, even critical, they simply wouldn't have happened without the funding and direction of the US Government (that is, you, the taxpayer).
There are essentially three political nodes. First, as mentioned, the initial decision in reaction to Sputnik to connect US science and defense industries that became ARPA.
Second was Congress asking ARPA to show something for all the money spent on it. So in 1969, ARPA made public (or more public) ARPAnet, splitting the military stuff off to a more secure network. Sen. Edward Kennedy was the Chair of that subcommittee.
Third was the Supercomputer Act of 1986, and related funding of internet projects. This was pushed though by Sen. Al Gore. This is why the net was free and fast, and ultimately led to the graphic user interface of the net known as the web.
The success of the internet and the world wide web was no accident, but the result of welding political will and technical achievement.
Posted by: Dave Romm on September 10, 2002 12:33 PM'What we now call the Internet was funded by the government specifically to provide command and control for nuclear missiles.'
Kind of. The theory was that in a nuclear conflict, any centralized system of communications switching would be toast, and take down the entire network with it; therefore, create a system able to route around damage.
Posted by: Jason McCullough on September 10, 2002 05:00 PMI think Dan Gillmor forgot the most important one:
11) Split up the TCP/IP protocol family in hundreds of distinct chunks. Each of these chunks can in principle be hacked on by a single person, and each one is connected to the rest of the family with well-defined, fairly straightforward interfaces. Advantages:
a) New chunks can easily replace old ones without compromising the rest of the family. This makes TCP/IP especially future-proof
b) Within the hacker community which implemented these protocols, this partitioning gave rise to a culture of "property rights" to each of these small chunks. Eric Raymond's "Homesteading the noosphere" describes this culture well.
http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/homesteading/homesteading/
None of this could have happened with the monolithic moloch that is the OSI stack. It's the difference between free market and central planning all over again.
Posted by: Thomas Blankenhorn on September 11, 2002 03:50 AMThomas Blankenhorn's comment is exactly the kind that gets me confused.
Perhaps I am missing a distinction between "free market" and "free enterprise/private industry", because (as I said in an earlier post on this topic) to me it is the *absence* of private industry in the innovations that led to the Internet that stands out.
Or perhaps a distinction needs to be made between "individual initiative" and "entrepreneurship". Granted that Mr. Blankenhor didn't use the e-word, but market populists like to identify any instance of initiative as entrepreneurship in order to justify claims that the market solves all problems.
Regardless, using the Internet as a demonstration of the virtues of the free market is surely stretching the truth a long way.
Posted by: Tom Slee on September 11, 2002 06:20 AMThe credit given to ARPA for the development of the Net is a little overblown, seems to me.
ARPAnet was developed in parallel with, and using the same contractors and technologiesas, Digital Equipment Corporation's Usenet/DECnet, a package switched net available to all DEC customers. In both cases the main technology developer was Bolt, Beranek and Newman, today's BBN. The difference is that in 1970, at a time when ARPAnet had seven nodes and maybe 300 users, Usenet (not today's news Usenet) had 400 nodes and maybe 10,000 users on line.
-dlj.
- An interesting point, DLJ. Not one I've heard before. Not sure that it changes my mind though :-)
Posted by: Tom Slee on September 12, 2002 06:11 AMThis page, among others, says DECnet wasn't using open protocols. All the networks were building on government research of researched protocols.
Anyway, there were lots of unconnected networks around; the miracle of ARPA/NSFNET was that it was easy to hook your already existing network up to it.
This is an excellent history.
Posted by: Jason McCullough on September 12, 2002 10:29 AM